Saturday, February 28, 2015

The U.S. Sentencing Commission issued a report on life in prison in the federal criminal justice system.
In fiscal year 2013, federal courts imposed a sentence of life imprisonment in 153 cases. The number of these cases in prior years has varied, with the highest number of life sentences having been imposed in fiscal year 2009, when the courts sentenced 280 offenders to life imprisonment. As of January 2015, there were 4,436 prisoners incarcerated in the Federal Bureau of Prisons serving a life prisonment sentence. 33 They accounted for 2.5 percent of the federal sentenced offenders in the BOP system.
Read the Entire Report

Friday, February 27, 2015

This is the seventh in a series from Dana Goldstein of the Justice Lab at The Marshall Project, Top 10 (Not Entirely Crazy) Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline:Crack is wackThere is little doubt that decreased demand for crack and heroin drove some of the initial drop in crime in the early 1990s. Crack was “a single generation drug,” Rosenfeld says. “The younger generation saw the devastation crack was doing in the neighborhoods and to their older cousins, brothers, sisters, and parents. You think to the image of the crack head. It wasn’t a pretty sight. There was nothing cool about it.” Yet because the cooling of the crack market happened so long ago, it is not a likely cause for the continued decline over the past two decades.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

The Washington Post asks: What’s worse – being sentenced to be executed or to spend the rest of one’s life in prison?
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber's, defense team includes two attorneys famous for ensuring that the former is replaced with the latter: Judy Clarke from San Diego, who has brokered many high-profile plea deals, and her frequent litigation partner David Bruck of Virginia. During the jury selection process, which is wrapping up in Boston this week, they have focused on drawing out jurors’ views on the death penalty, and with some regularity have elicited the response that life imprisonment is the harsher of the two options while the death penalty is “the easy way out.”
These potential jurors may have a point. Tsarnaev, 21, has been in solitary confinement for a year and a half. Like a handful of other inmates in the U.S., he has also been subjected to “special administrative measures,” or SAMs, while in pretrial detention; if he is sentenced to life imprisonment, SAMs will almost certainly remain in force.
On Wednesday, as the court continued to interview potential jurors, the Boston Bar Association issued a statement calling on the Justice Department to take the death penalty off the table and arguing that a plea agreement in exchange for a life sentence would be in the interests of justice. If a plea agreement were to happen, Tsarnaev would stay alone in his cell, under SAMs: He could never have physical contact or a private conversation with anyone except a prison guard for the rest of his life.
To read more CLICK HERE

This is the sixth in a series from Dana Goldstein of the Justice Lab at The Marshall Project, Top 10 (Not Entirely Crazy) Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline:The tech thesisAir conditioning and television brought people from the streets into their homes, a safer environment. Cars are now much more difficult to steal, because of sophisticated ignition and locking systems. The introduction of debit cards, including for the distribution of welfare benefits, means people carry less cash, which makes them less likely to become victims. “These forces change the dynamic of normal life,” Roman says. “How much do they explain the crime decline in the 1990s? A little bit. But they are dwarfed by the end of the crack epidemic and all the violence associated with it.”

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

The deep freeze gripping the eastern half of the country has become a sort of test case for a popular notion about the relationship between weather and crime: Law-breaking slows when it's cold, and picks up as the temperature rises, reported NBC News.

The premise makes sense, anecdotally. It also has been repeatedly tested by researchers, who've come to similar conclusions.

"The general pattern is that extreme weather tends to cause an across-the-board decrease in crime when it's cold," said Matthew Ranson, an economist for the Cambridge, Massachusetts, consulting firm Abt Associates. He recently published results of a study in which he combined 30 years of data across the country and found "a very strong historical relationship between temperature and crime."

Monday, February 23, 2015

This is the fifth in a series from Dana Goldstein of the Justice Lab at The Marshall Project, Top 10 (Not Entirely Crazy) Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline:Aging boomersHistorians agree that the crime wave of the 1960s and 1970s had a lot to do with the baby boom: There were more young men than ever before, and young men are the people who commit most crimes. As the boomers aged out of trouble in the early 1980s, crime fell. But from 1992 to today, the period of the crime decline, there was no significant decrease in the number of young men in the United States. This suggests the size of the youth population is no longer a major driver of crime.A small caveat: Some experts believe the growth in the population over the age of 50 has contributed to better public safety, because there are more adults monitoring young people’s behavior. “My sense is that there is some connection there,” Rosenfeld says, but if so, it would account for only a small percentage of the crime drop.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

This is the fourth in a series from Dana Goldstein of the Justice Lab at The Marshall Project, Top 10 (Not Entirely Crazy) Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline:The lead hypothesisThis is perhaps the trendiest crime decline hypothesis in 2014, and it was the subject of an entire session of the National Academy roundtable’s work. The effect of lead on children’s brains has been well documented: Exposure to the chemical causes aggressive behavior and cognitive delays. In the wake of the 1970 Clean Air Act, lead was removed from gasoline and, increasingly, from paint. Economist Jessica Reyes estimates that phasing out lead was responsible for 56 percent of the reduction in violent crime (although she could find no relationship between lead and property crime). Experts still disagree about how plausible it is that lead alone could have been responsible for such a massive portion of the crime drop. “It’s fair to say that our assessment of this hypothesis is ‘case not proved’—or at least ‘not yet proved,’ ” Rosenfeld said

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Pennsylvania is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. Kathleen Kane, the state’s attorney general, is currently embroiled in an ever-widening scandal.

Kane’s election was a watershed moment in Pennsylvania politics. In 1980, the attorney general position in Pennsylvania went from an appointed office to an elected office with Kane becoming the first woman and first Democrat elected attorney general.

Kane is now facing possible charges including perjury, false swearing, official oppression and obstruction of justice relating to grand jury secrets she allegedly disclosed to the media.

The investigation into Kane surfaced last fall when The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a statewide grand jury was looking into the publication of secret grand jury records related to a 2009 attorney general’s office investigation of Philadelphia’s NAACP.

The grand jury’s presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor, Thomas Carluccio, to look into the leak. Kane has challenged the authority of special prosecutor. Kane wants Carluccio’s appointment declared unlawful and the grand jury’s report vacated. In the meantime, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court put a hold on criminal charges against Kane until the court decides the authority of the special prosecutor. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the case on March 11.

The grand jury report issued in December said there were reasonable grounds to charge Kane. Before the grand jury report was officially released, the recommended charges were leaked to the media. The Inquirer cited anonymous sources in reporting that the grand jury had recommended charges against Kane and the matter was referred to the Montgomery County district attorney.

Soon after, two Inquirer journalists were subpoenaed in an effort to determine who had leaked the information to the newspaper. The grand jury was now investigating a leak of grand jury information from a grand jury investigating a leak.

In anticipation of the Supreme Court’s review of the special prosecutor’s authority, Judge William Carpenter, who sits as the supervising judge of the statewide investigating grand jury and appointed the special prosecutor investigating Kane, wrote a court opinion.

Judge Carpenter wrote, “Attorney General Kane should not be granted such monumental relief simply because she is the attorney general … No other citizen would be granted such relief, and citizen Kane (emphasis added) should be treated no better than any other citizen.”

To use another cinematic allusion it appears the attorney general is the casualty of a Kane mutiny. A recent set of court filings revealed that the investigation of Kane was initiated by longtime state prosecutors Frank Fina and E. Marc Costanzo.

According to the Harrisburg Patriot-News, Fina and Costanzo wrote Judge Carpenter on May 8, 2014, alerting him to a call they’d received the day before from a Philadelphia Daily News reporter outlining information from a 2009 grand jury case.

The problems between Fina and Kane are now legend around the state capitol. Although a Penn State-Sandusky investigation led by Fina and reviewed by Kane found no political influence, it did uncover an email pornography scandal in the attorney general’s office. The porn scandal brought down a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice, a member of former Gov. Tom Corbett’s cabinet and a member of the Board of Probation and Parole.

Kane then dropped a Fina-led investigation into political corruption in Philadelphia. Fina’s new boss, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams, picked up the investigation and has successfully pursued several prosecutions.

Now, the state Supreme Court has requested yet another investigation. This investigation is looking into the disclosure of an order of court that was issued as part of the stay of criminal charges against Kane.

Recently unsealed documents in the case show the state Supreme Court has called on the state Office of Disciplinary Counsel to investigate the disclosure of a previously sealed court order. Media outlets, including Patriot-News and The Inquirer, have reported that this time, Kane’s attorney, Lanny Davis, is the apparent subject of the investigation.

The plot thickens as the criminal justice system in Pennsylvania sputters under a cloud of intrigue and deception.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George. His book, “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010,” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.
Visit Column

Friday, February 20, 2015

This is the third in a series from Dana Goldstein of the Justice Lab at The Marshall Project, Top 10 (Not Entirely Crazy) Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline:Immigration and GentrificationGiven that some American cities, regardless of policing tactics, experienced big crime declines while others remained dangerous, a few criminologists began to wonder if two other urban trends of the past 30 years had impacted crime: increased immigration and gentrification.Roman notes that cities with more Central American immigration, such as New York, Dallas, and San Diego, experienced bigger crime declines than cities with fewer immigrants, such as Philadelphia or Baltimore. Why? After upwardly mobile immigrants flood a chronically high-poverty neighborhood once characterized by inter-generational poverty, middle-class artists and professionals begin to arrive, bringing “wealth, resources, and political capital that didn’t previously exist,” he says. “It creates a virtuous cycle. Places become safer and it expands throughout the city.” The powerful intervention, Roman writes, is not displacement of the poor (which only moves crime from one neighborhood to another), but rather the positive effects of integration, in which people of different races and classes live in close proximity to one another.In the end, each of these 10 theories probably hold some limited explanatory power. What social scientists have learned over the past 30 years, according to Zimring, is that “serious crime is a more superficial behavior” than people assumed back in the era of so-called “superpredator” kids. Most criminals are responding to neighborhood, economic, and health conditions that can quickly shift and improve. “Crime rates can change when deep structures don’t change,” Zimring says.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Matthew T. Mangino, Guest ColumnistDelaware County Daily Times
February 18, 2015
Last week, Gov. Tom Wolf declared a moratorium on the death penalty in Pennsylvania. The legal authority to do so exists pursuant to Article IV, Section 9 of the Pennsylvania Constitution. The governor has exclusive authority to grant reprieves and may exercise that authority for any reason — or no reason at all.
The uproar over the governor’s action is misguided. Pennsylvania has executed three men since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978. All three men waived their appeal rights and volunteered to be executed. In fact, Pennsylvania has not carried out an involuntary execution since 1962.
There are approximately 186 men and women on Pennsylvania’s death row. Three of the longest serving men—John Lesko, Michael Travaglia and Henry Fahy—each, have served more than 30 years on death row.
Wolf’s announcement of a moratorium on the death penalty suggested that the current system of capital punishment is “error-prone, expensive and anything but infallible,” the Pennsylvania District Attorney’s Association was quick to respond, “He has rejected the decisions of juries that wrestled with the facts and the law before unanimously imposing the death penalty, disregarded a long line of decisions made by Pennsylvania and federal judges, ignored the will of the Legislature, and ultimately turned his back on the silenced victims of cold-blooded killers.”
Gov. Wolf did not make this decision in a vacuum. He sought the counsel of others including a former federal judge before making his decision. “I concluded that if a governor believed it would be in the interests of the commonwealth to issue a moratorium by granting reprieves for the purpose of studying the fairness and effectiveness of the administration of the death penalty, this would be a proper exercise of his or her authority under the Pennsylvania Constitution,” said former U.S. Circuit Court Judge Timothy K. Lewis.
Wolf granted a temporary reprieve to inmate Terrance Williams who was scheduled to be executed on March 4 and Wolf will continue to grant reprieves until the Pennsylvania Task Force and Advisory Committee on Capital Punishment, of which I am a member, completes its report.
Our committee was created by legislative action in 2011. The work of the committee is important and the painstaking collection and analysis of data is essential to making sound recommendations to the Legislature and the governor. The collection of data has also slowed the process down.
It is not as though executions are being carried out in other states across the country. There were 35 executions nationwide in 2014. Only eight states carried out executions. In fact three states — Texas, Missouri and Florida — were responsible for 28 of the 35 executions.
There are 32 states that have the death penalty on the books. Governors in Oregon, Colorado, Washington and Ohio have imposed moratoriums on executions. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich canceled all seven executions scheduled for 2015.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a lethal injection case for the second time in seven years. In 2008, the high court upheld the constitutionality of Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol.
The new case, out of Oklahoma, was brought by inmates who claim the state execution protocol violates the Constitution’s ban against cruel and unusual punishment. The decision will be closely watched.
Gov. Wolf’s action is appropriate given the history, or lack thereof, of executions in Pennsylvania, the pending report and the Supreme Court’s decision to address lethal injection yet again.Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly and George in New Castle. He is the former district attorney of Lawrence County and a member of the Pennsylvania Task Force and Advisory Committee on Capital Punishment. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released last year by McFarland and Co.
Visit The Daily Times

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

The English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), once wrote “Revenge is a kind of wild justice.” In the modern era of Pennsylvania politics. Justice has indeed been wild.

In the last decade, the state has seen a Supreme Court justice convicted; her sister, a state senator, imprisoned; and two House Speakers and minority leaders in the House and Senate jailed. A host of legislators have left in disgrace. Last month, State Treasure Rob McCord resigned with the intent to plead guilty to federal criminal charges, and in the 1990s a Republican Attorney General went to prison.

Now, in that spirit of “wild justice, the knives are out for Kathleen Kane, the first female (and first Democrat) elected in 34 years as state Attorney General. Prominent members of Kane’s own Democratic party are aligning themselves to take her job. Those hopefuls are not talking about a 2016 primary challenge: they are wooing Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf for a possible appointment.

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams told the New York Times, “I have a great job in Philadelphia…(But) if the governor called me, I’d have to think about it.”

Kane, once the rising star of Pennsylvania politics, is in a steep dive. Her tenure could soon end with a resignation, conviction or impeachment.

Kane, a one-time assistant district attorney in Lackawanna County, ran an interesting campaign for attorney general. She was funded significantly by her husband, a successful businessman, from whom she has since filed for divorce.

The cornerstone of her campaign was the pledge to review the investigation of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football assistant who was convicted of sexually assaulting young boys on campus. The original investigation tarnished the mystique of Penn State football and brought down football legend Joe Paterno.

Now, Kane wants Pennsylvanians to believe that the Penn State investigation is the reason why a group of “angry men” is trying to bring her down.

The second investigation of Penn State led to nothing. But the special investigator hired by Kane to look into the matter uncovered the pervasive distribution of pornographic emails within the AG’s office—justice gone wild. The emails led to the firing of a cabinet member and the resignation of a Supreme Court justice and a member of the Board of Probation and Parole.

Kane also became embroiled in a public feud with Frank Fina, a senior assistant attorney general, who resigned when Kane was elected. Fina had oversight responsibilities for the Sandusky investigation. Fina subsequently took a job with Williams in the Philadelphia DA’s office.

When Kane discontinued an investigation of Philadelphia political corruption overseen in the AG’s Office by Fina, Williams decided to pick-up the investigation. The acerbic public discourse between Williams and Kane was embarrassing; however, to Williams’ credit, the revived investigation has resulted in several guilty pleas.

Then, in May, Montgomery County Judge William Carpenter appointed special prosecutor Thomas Carluccio to oversee a grand jury investigating whether Kane leaked secret grand jury information to a Philadelphia newspaper in an effort to embarrass a former prosecutor from her office. Kane was presumably seeking some revenge against Fina.

The grand jury voted in December to recommend that the district attorney charge Kane with 12 counts, including obstruction, perjury and false swearing. Ironically, the investigation into leaking grand jury information was leaked to the media.
Can justice get any more wild in Pennsylvania?
Sure, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stepped in and stopped any action until the court hears arguments regarding Kane’s challenge to the appointment of the special prosecutor.
Kane has argued that there is no statute in the state that would allow a judge’s “unilateral selection and appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Office of Attorney General.”
“At one point, the appointment of a special independent prosecutor was lawful in Pennsylvania, under the Independent Counsel Authorization Act,” Kane said in a court filing, reported by The Legal Intelligencer. “That act, however, expired in 2003, and no statute has been enacted to replace it.”
Attorneys for Kane also point to Smith v. Gallagher, a 1962 Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that judges have no authority to select and appoint a special prosecutor to conduct an investigating grand jury.
Kane’s wild legal troubles continue to mount. State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, plans to introduce a revised impeachment resolution in the new legislative session that considers the current potential criminal charges facing Kane.
His initial impeachment resolution focused on several of Kane’s actions, including her decision not to defend the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s same-sex marriage law, and her decision to discontinue the Philadelphia political corruption investigation.
Kane does not appear to be a wilting wild flower. She vowed not to resign and told the New York Times, “The people I care about the most, the people of Pennsylvania, support me.”
“Everywhere I go,” she added. “People recognize me, and every person says the same thing: ‘We see this for what it is worth. It’s sickening. Hang in there.’ ”Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.
Visit The Crime Report

With the rapidly approaching departure of Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, conjecture is flying about what he might do with the 33 men and one woman on Oregon's death row. Kitzhaber resigned over corruption allegation involving his girlfriend, according to The Oregonian.
Before he leaves office on February 18, 2015, Kitzhaber has the power to empty death row -- in other words, commute every inmate's capital sentence to life in prison. Some of those inmates could be eligible for parole after 30 years.
"And there would be no appeal," said Benjamin Kim, an Oregon City attorney who represents aggravated murder defendants.
It's not unprecedented for an outgoing governor to take that bold step.
In 2003, former Illinois Gov. George Ryan made international headlines when he commuted the sentences of more than 150 death row inmates just before leaving office.
Just a few weeks ago, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley granted clemency to the last four inmates on death row one day before his political term was up. O'Malley had previously succeeded in pushing lawmakers to abolish Maryland's death penalty, so no new inmates were being added to death row.
To read more CLICK HERE

Attorney General Eric Holder has called for a moratorium on the death penalty pending a Supreme Court decision on the use of lethal injection drugs in Oklahoma, reported The Huffington Post.Speaking at a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Holder, noting that he was speaking in a personal capacity and not as a member of the administration, said the "inevitable" possibility of executing an innocent individual is what makes him oppose capital punishment.
"Our system of justice is the best in the world. It is comprised of men and women who do the best they can, get it right more often than not, substantially more right than wrong," Holder said. "There's always the possibility that mistakes will be made ... It's for that reason that I am opposed to the death penalty."
He continued: "I think fundamental questions about the death penalty need to be asked. And among them, the Supreme Court's determination as to whether or not lethal injection is consistent with our Constitution is one that ought to occur. From my perspective, I think a moratorium until the Supreme Court made that determination would be appropriate."
Holder clarified that his personal views on the matter are not part of an ongoing Justice Department review of state execution practices.
To read more CLICK HERE

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Utah's House of Representatives approved a bill allowing the use of firing squads in executions, reported UPI.
Utah's bill to return to the use of firing squads, stopped in 2004, was narrowly passed in the Republican-controlled House, and requires approval in the Senate, where Republicans are also in the majority. Republican Gov. Gary Herbert has not indicated if he would sign the bill into law. The bill specifies that a firing squad be available as backup if specified drugs for execution are not available 30 days prior to an execution, or if lethal injection is ruled unconstitutional. Last week Wyoming's House of Representatives passed a similar bill, which must be approved by the state Senate and the governor, with the added stipulation the inmate to be executed must be unconscious at the time of the execution. Opponents of the bill in Utah argue firing squads evoke images of Wild West justice, noting the state's execution by gunshot has its basis in the disavowed Mormon practice of "blood atonement." The 32 states in which capital punishment remains legal have researched alternatives to lethal injection after pharmaceutical companies began refusing to supply necessary drugs, typically blended to provide a fatal dose. Attempts to employ compounding pharmacies, in secret, have met with legal roadblocks.To read more CLICK HERE

Monday, February 16, 2015

This the second in a series from Dana Goldstein of the Justice Lab at The Marshall Project, Top 10 (Not Entirely Crazy) Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline:The happy pill thesis
Psychologists David Finkelhor and Lisa Jones suggest that crimes committed both by and against young people declined because of the ways in which antidepressants and anti-ADHD medications, like Prozac and Ritalin, improved human behavior and moods.
Rosenfeld considers this work fascinating but preliminary. “There are individual children who were highly aggressive, started their regimen of Adderall, and then calmed down. But it’s a far cry from that connection to suggest the population rate of crime has come down as a consequence of the spread of this new type of medication. Case not proved.”

Matthew T. ManginoThe Vindicator
February 15, 2015
Last May, Ohio reached an agreement with the Justice Department, requiring the state’s Department of Youth Services to reduce, and eventually eliminate, the use of seclusion on young people in custody. In Ohio, solitary confinement of young people was practiced with such frequency that the state was among the top three in the nation to use seclusion according to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
However, Ohio has a long way to go in terms of reducing the pervasive use of solitary confinement in state prisons and county jails.
Correction officials will say that restrictive housing—solitary confinement—is for the worst of the worst. There would be chaos inside the prison walls if there was no way to punish unruly, violent or dangerous prisoners.
Unfortunately, solitary confinement — the prison within the prison — is not just for the violent or dangerous. “The hole” as many inmates refer to it, is a dumping ground for the most vulnerable prisoners.Serious mental illness
A 2006 study by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics found that more than 64 percent of local inmates, 56 percent of state prisoners and 45 percent of federal prisoners have symptoms of serious mental illnesses.
Inmates with serious mental illness often struggle to conform to prison rules and increasingly end up in isolation as a result.
Granted, isolation and solitary confinement are not just for the mentally ill. Prisoners can be placed in such units for many reasons—as punishment for breaking prison rules; while under investigation; when suspected of gang involvement; protection of the inmate; protection of staff and other inmates.
Although conditions vary from state to state and even institution to institution, isolation and solitary confinement and the accompanying restrictions take many different forms. The American Friends Service Committee, an organization that once won the Nobel Peace Prize, lists on its website some of the restrictions as confinement for 23 hours a day; infrequent phone calls and rare non-contact family visits; limited access to rehabilitative or educational programming; and restricted reading material and personal property.
According to the Washington Post, more than 4 percent of Texas’ prisoners — more than 6,000 people — are in solitary, spending an average of nearly four years in near-total isolation, locked in 60-square-foot cells for at least 22 hours a day.
How does solitary confinement affect prisoners? Stuart Grassian, a board-certified psychiatrist and a former faculty member at Harvard Medical School, told NPR he had interviewed hundreds of prisoners in solitary confinement.
In one study, he found that roughly a third of solitary inmates were “actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.” Grassian concluded that solitary can cause a specific psychiatric syndrome, characterized by hallucinations, panic attacks, overt paranoia, diminished impulse control, hypersensitivity to external stimuli and difficulties with thinking and memory.
In Pennsylvania, the state Department of Corrections recently settled a lawsuit with the Disability Rights Network that will result in new rules regarding the use of solitary confinement for mentally ill inmates. Under the agreement, reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, when any of the state’s 8,000 inmates with serious mental illness breaks prison rules, they may go to Diversionary Treatment Units, not solitary confinement.Treatment
In the new units, they will get treatment and a minimum of 20 hours per week outside of the cell, including 10 “structured” and 10 “unstructured” hours. By mid-2016, Pennsylvania will stop punishing seriously mentally ill inmates with assignments to solitary confinement.
Correction’s Secretary John Wetzel told the Post-Gazette, the state was “stepping up to do the right thing” in an era in which prisons “have become the de facto system responsible for treating the mentally ill.”Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino)

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Twenty-nine years ago, when Congress considered the privacy to be afforded electronic communications, the concept of the Internet, text messaging and electronic storage of documents was still the stuff of science fiction.

Today, 84 percent of U.S. households own a computer with access to the Internet, and 91 percent of Americans have a cellphone, according to Pew Research.

The media has been plastered with news of the data breach at Anthem were hackers stole names, Social Security numbers and other sensitive information from as many as 80 million customers. Americans are up in arms.

Yet few people know that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 makes private information — emails, text messages and electronically stored documents — available to law enforcement and the government six months after sent, received or stored.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized that citizens in a democratic society have a reasonable expectation of privacy for their “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” However, today with a significant amount of “papers and effects” stored electronically, those protections secured more than two centuries ago have begun to erode.

The “180-day rule,” as it has become known, allows law enforcement officials to treat any emails, text messages or documents stored on remote servers — popularly known as the cloud — as “abandoned” if stored for more than 180 days, reported McClatchy.

Traditionally, the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment as not providing privacy protection to property that has been abandoned. For instance, luggage at an airport that an individual refuses to claim or acknowledge ownership over — or garbage that is set at the curb — is considered abandoned and no longer afforded constitutional protection.

Can the same be said for an eight-month old email or document stored in the cloud? The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 was written at a time when the breadth of electronic communication had not yet been fully contemplated.

Congressman Kevin Yoder, a Republican from Kansas, is leading an effort in the House of Representatives to update the law.

“They [police] couldn’t kick down your door and seize the documents on your desk, but they could send a request to Google and ask for all the documents that are in your Gmail account. And I don’t think Americans believe that the Constitution ends with the invention of the Internet,” Yoder said in a statement.

Yoder’s Bill has bipartisan support. He has partnered with Congressman Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat in the House and Senators Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, in the U.S. Senate.

If passed into law, the legislation would protect the confidentiality of electronic communications described in the current law and prohibit the government from seeking or forcing disclosure of digital communication content without a warrant issued by “a court of competent jurisdiction directing the disclosure.”

In other words, law enforcement would have to show the court there is sufficient proof to obtain a warrant based on probable cause.

Some states are not waiting for the federal government to take action. Yoder introduced the same legislation last year with more than half of the House signing on as co-sponsors. The bill never made it to the Judiciary Committee for consideration. In California, legislation was recently introduced that would prohibit warrantless law enforcement access to emails, text messages and electronically stored documents. Sponsored by State Sen. Mark Leno, the legislation known as the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant before accessing an individual’s private electronic communications.

Amending the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act is not without opponents. Law enforcement and administrative agencies argue that the new restrictions will make it difficult to fight crime and terrorism.

The Securities and Exchange Commission was largely responsible for stopping the passage of a bill during the previous legislative session, according to the Personal Liberty Blog. As a civil regulatory agency, the SEC lacks the power to obtain a search warrant and relies on subpoena power to enable email reviews in its investigation of corporate wrongdoing and insider trading.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George. His book, “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010,” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.

Dana Goldstein of the Justice Lab at The Marshall Project has prepared a Top 10 (Not Entirely Crazy) Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline. Below is the first in a series of Goldstein's reasons for the dramatic decline in crime since the mid-1990s:

The “abortion filter”
In 1999 and again in 2005, economists Steven Levitt and John Donohue triggered a sensation with their theory that the legalization of abortion was responsible for as much as half of the crime decline. The idea was that a drop in unwanted children led to better parenting and fewer delinquent young men. It’s easy to see why the media loved this hypothesis, which seemed to piss off everyone else: Conservatives hated the notion that abortion might have led to a major social good, while liberals pushed back against the assumption that bad parenting had been the cause of crime in the first place.
Today, the abortion hypothesis holds less water. “Generally speaking, it has been discredited,” Rosenfeld says. Violent crime continued to rise into the early years of the 1990s, when the first generation of boys who went through the “abortion filter” were already in their late teens to early 20s, older than the age—13—at which criminal behavior typically emerges. Evidence from other nations showed little relationship between the legalization of abortion and the crime rate. If abortion does account for a fraction of the American crime decline, it is likely a small one.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf announced today that he has placed a moratorium on the state's death penalty.

Wolf said the moratorium will remain until has reviewed an upcoming report by the Pennsylvania Task Force and Advisory Commission on Capital Punishment, which was established in 2011 to review the death penalty policy.

"This moratorium is in no way an expression of sympathy for the guilty on death row, all of whom have been convicted of committing heinous crimes," Wolf said in a statement. "This decision is based on a flawed system that has been proven to be an endless cycle of court proceedings as well as ineffective, unjust, and expensive."

Wolf's action put the execution of Terrance Williams on hold. Williams, who was convicted of a 1984 murder, was scheduled to be executed on March 4. Williams would have been the first person executed in the state since 1999.

According to the state, Pennsylvania currently has 186 inmates on death row.

Arizona's new Republican governor Doug Ducey said during his inaugural address "Fair warning: The budget will not meet with general approval among special interests." he said. "I can assure you that a more efficient government is not only necessary, but sensible." But there was one special interest group that must have been pleased when Ducey rolled out his budget proposal: the private prison industry, reported Mother Jones.
Ducey's austere budget plan slashed $384 million in state programs, including $75 million in funding for Arizona's public universities. But it earmarked $5 million for a new, 3,000-bed private prison that even the state's most notorious law enforcement official, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, argues is unnecessary.
While Ducey makes the case to spend money on a new prison, Arizona universities are fighting off deepening budget cuts. The proposed $75 million cut represents 10 percent of the total budget for Arizona's three major public universities, a threshold that school regents said they'd accept. Concern has mounted, however, that more than $90 million could be cut. From 2009 to 2012, Arizona universities saw $400 million in cuts, which the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities called the largest education cuts in the country. Since then, tuition has doubled and enrollment has increased.
Critics of Ducey's prison plan have argued that funding a private prison is not a one-time expense.
The state would be locked in for $100 million in operating costs over three years, and as much as $1.5 billion over the next two decades, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, an Arizona think tank. Beyond that, depending on contract specifics, Arizona is required to keep private facilities at 90 to 100 percent occupancy—a burden that several experts believe could thwart Arizona's emerging criminal-justice-reform movement, which is targeting harsh sentencing laws, among other things, that add to the state's high incarceration rate.
To read more CLICK HERE

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Koch Industries, Inc., the corporation led by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch, is holding discussions with a coalition of strange bedfellows to tackle criminal justice reform, reported The Huffington Post.
In conversations with people like Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and organizations like the ACLU, the Koch brothers are homing in on reducing overcriminalization and mass incarceration, as well as reforming practices like civil forfeiture. Progressives, rather than giving the Kochs the stink eye, are welcoming their efforts.
Koch Industries general counsel and senior vice president Mark Holden told The Huffington Post that he met with Booker and his staff a few weeks ago. The New Jersey Democrat and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are co-sponsoring the REDEEM Act, legislation that would give states incentives to increase the age of criminal responsibility to 18, among other reforms.
Criminal justice reform isn't a new area for the Kochs. A spokeswoman says the company has five to six people working on these issues and has donated "seven-figure funding" in total over the past 10 years to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, an organization that promotes justice and due process. (To put that figure into perspective, however, the Koch Brothers have reportedly budgeted $889 million for the 2016 presidential and congressional races alone.) In addition to giving grants to NACDL, Koch has invested a significant amount of money on criminal justice reform efforts for more than 10 years, the spokeswoman said.
To read more CLICK HERE

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Thiel College-Comment Project No. 3What will the U.S. Supreme Court do with lethal injection as the court reviews the procedure for the second time in seven years? How does the upcoming Oklahoma case of Glossip v. Gross differ from Baze v. Rees?

The 8th Execution of 2015
Walter Timothy Storey convicted of breaking into his neighbor's home in a St. Louis suburb and slitting her throat was the first Missouri inmate put to death this year after a record 10 executions in 2014, reported The Associated Press.
His fate was sealed when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt the execution over concerns about Missouri's secretive process for obtaining and using the lethal injection drug pentobarbital.
Strapped to the gurney, Storey mouthed what appeared to be "I love you" to his witnesses and the family of the victim, Jill Frey. A few seconds later, he began to start chanting something.
Moments after the drug was administered at 12:01 a.m. on February 11, 2015, he stopped suddenly and heaved one deep final breath. He was pronounced dead at 12:10.
Jeff Frey, the victim's brother, said the "sad and devastating ordeal" of the killing and the protracted court delays took a toll on the family. He said the execution "brings a sense of closure to a part of this unspeakable tragedy in our lives. It will not bring Jill back, nor will it ever lessen the pain and suffering we go through every day."
Storey was sentenced to death three separate times in the same case. He was living with his mother in a St. Charles apartment on Feb. 2, 1990, when he became upset over his pending divorce. He spent an angry night drinking beer.
He ran out of beer and money, so he decided to break into the neighboring apartment of Frey to steal money for more beer.
Frey, a 36-year-old special education teacher, had left the sliding glass door of her balcony open. Storey climbed the balcony and confronted Frey in her bedroom, where he beat her. Frey suffered six broken ribs and severe wounds to her head and face.
Storey used a kitchen knife to slit her throat so deeply that her spine was damaged. Frey died of blood loss and asphyxiation.
Storey left the body and returned the next day to clean up blood, throw clothes in a trash bin and scrub Frey's fingernails to remove any traces of his skin.
But he missed a key piece of evidence: blood on a dresser.
Storey was tried again in 1997, and sentenced again to death. That conviction was also overturned, this time over a procedural error by the judge. Storey was sentenced to death a third time in 1999.
To read more CLICK HERE

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

The 7th Execution of 2015
A member of the notorious "Texas Seven" gang of prison fugitives, whose 2000 prison break was the largest in state history, was executed on February 4, 2015 for the murder of an Irving police officer, reported the Texas Tribune.
A final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied, and Donald Keith Newbury, 52, was pronounced dead by lethal injection in Huntsville at 6:25 p.m. for the capital murder of Officer Aubrey Hawkins.
"That each new indignity defeats only the body. Pampering the spirit with obscure merit. I love you all, that's it," were Newbury's last words according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Newbury was serving a 99-year sentence for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon out of Travis County when he and six other inmates staged a brazen escape from the John B. Connally Unit near Kenedy, Texas, on Dec. 13, 2000, after overpowering 14 prison employees.
On Dec. 19, the group checked into a Dallas-Fort Worth area motel using assumed names, and from there they plotted the burglary of an Oshman's Sporting Goods store in nearby Irving.
On Christmas Eve, the inmates broke into the store and tied up the staff as they moved to steal some 40 guns and ammunition and $70,000 in cash.
Hawkins had just finished Christmas Eve dinner at a restaurant with his family when he got the call about the break-in at the store, which was nearby. The officer was ambushed as soon as he arrived by the inmates. He was shot 11 times, pulled out of his patrol car and run over by the gang as the fugitives escaped.
Newbury was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2002.
Michael Rodriguez was the first of the seven to be executed, in 2008. George Rivas, the group's mastermind, was executed three years ago.
Three others remain on death row: Larry Garcia, Patrick Murphy and Randy Halprin.
Newbury has spent most of his life in prison and jail. He was paroled in 1985 and again in 1992. In 1981, Newbury and two other inmates attempted to escape while they were held at the Travis County Jail by attacking two guards, according to the Texas attorney general's office.
Newbury told The Associated Press in 2003 his trial was "a farce" and said he regretted not testifying.
"We're not the Hannibal Lecters people believe," Newbury told the AP.
To read more CLICK HERE

Monday, February 9, 2015

More than a dozen states are considering new legislation aimed at increasing police accountability in the wake of incidents in Ferguson, Mo.; Staten Island, N.Y.; and Cleveland that left unarmed black men dead at the hands of officers.
Dozens of bills addressing body cameras for police have been filed in at least 13 states. Other proposed measures would change the way police departments report officer-involved shootings, racial profiling and the way courts deal with low-level offenders.
“There is a concrete coherent legislative agenda that we are pushing for,” said Cornell Brooks, president and chief executive of the NAACP. “We’ve been doing this from state capital to state capital, as well as here in Washington, D.C.”
Some of the proposed responses have bipartisan support. In other cases, familiar partisan divides between Republicans and Democrats, and civil rights groups and police organizations, are emerging and slowing down legislative action.
According to William Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, lawmakers in California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia have already filed or pre-filed measures that would require at least some law enforcement officials to wear body cameras.
To read more CLICK HERE

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Utah lawmaker has said he plans to introduce a bill that would allow the state to execute criminals convicted of child sex trafficking, calling it a necessary protection for defenseless children, reported the Chicago Tribune.
The hardline plan from state Rep. Paul Ray faces several legislative hurdles before it could become law, and it would test the boundaries of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on the death penalty, a challenge the Clearfield Republican said he welcomes.
"I'm sure we'll have to have that discussion with the Supreme Court," Ray said. "I'd like to push it, absolutely."
Ray said there's no recent case that prompted him to announce his plan, but it's the second time this session he's raised a proposal to change the state's execution laws. Ray's bill to bring back firing squads passed a committee hearing Wednesday by one vote.
To read more CLICK HERE

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Prison is not a pleasant place. Every single occupant has committed a crime or series of crimes, each defying the laws and morals of society. That reluctance to conform doesn’t end at the prison gate. Within the prison walls, many inmates continue to ignore the concepts of order and justice.

For those inmates there is a prison within the prison. Correction officials will say that restrictive housing — solitary confinement — is for the worst of the worst. There would be chaos inside the prison walls if there was no way to punish unruly, violent or dangerous prisoners.

Unfortunately, the prison within the prison is not just for the violent or dangerous — “the hole,” as many inmates refer to it, is a dumping ground for the most vulnerable prisoners.

A 2006 study by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics found that more than 64 percent of local jail inmates, 56 percent of state prisoners and 45 percent of federal prisoners have symptoms of serious mental illnesses.

Inmates with serious mental illness often struggle to conform to prison rules and increasingly end up in isolation as a result.

Granted, isolation and solitary confinement are not just for the mentally ill. Prisoners can be placed in such units for many reasons — as punishment for breaking prison rules; while under investigation; when suspected of gang involvement; protection of the inmate; protection of staff and other inmates.

Although conditions vary from state to state, and even institution to institution, isolation and solitary confinement, and the accompanying restrictions, take many different forms. The American Friends Service Committee, an organization that once won the Nobel Peace Prize, lists on its website some of the restrictions as — confinement for 23 hours a day; infrequent phone calls and rare non-contact family visits; limited access to rehabilitative or educational programming; and restricted reading material and personal property.

According to The Washington Post, more than 4 percent of Texas’s prisoners — more than 6,000 people — are in solitary, spending an average of nearly four years in near-total isolation, locked in 60-square-foot cells for at least 22 hours a day.

How does solitary confinement effect prisoners? Stuart Grassian, a board-certified psychiatrist and a former faculty member at Harvard Medical School, told NPR interviewed hundreds of prisoners in solitary confinement.

In one study, he found that roughly a third of solitary inmates were “actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.” Grassian concluded that solitary can cause a specific psychiatric syndrome, characterized by hallucinations; panic attacks; overt paranoia; diminished impulse control; hypersensitivity to external stimuli; and difficulties with thinking, concentration and memory.

Progress is being made in some parts of the country. A new rule approved by the New York City Board of Correction will prohibit the use of solitary confinement to punish inmates aged 21 and younger on Rikers Island, the city’s primary jail complex. Slate reported that the new rule comes about a year after city officials announced that Rikers would no longer subject inmates classified as “seriously mentally ill” to solitary confinement.

In Pennsylvania, the state Department of Corrections recently settled a lawsuit with the Disability Rights Network that will result in new rules regarding the use of solitary confinement for mentally ill inmates. Under the agreement, reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, when any of the state’s 8,000 inmates with serious mental illness break prison rules, they may go to diversionary treatment units, not solitary confinement.

In the new units, they will get treatment and a minimum of 20 hours per week outside of the cell, including 10 “structured” and 10 “unstructured” hours. By mid-2016, Pennsylvania will stop punishing seriously mentally ill inmates with assignments to solitary confinement.

Corrections Secretary John Wetzel told The Post-Gazette, the state was “stepping up to do the right thing” in an era in which prisons “have become the de facto system responsible for treating the mentally ill.”

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George. His book, “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010,” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.
Visit the Column

Friday, February 6, 2015

The lethal injection landscape has been fraught with issues since 2011, when Hospira, the only American manufacturer of a key lethal injection drug, stopped its production in the midst of an international campaign by capital punishment opponents. The company's decision set off a scramble to find another supplier and ultimately another drug, reported ProPublica.
In late 2013, Florida became the first state to execute an individual using midazolam, but it wasn't until April 2014 that concerns about midazolam became widespread. That month, Oklahoma botched the execution of prisoner Clayton Lockett. Despite receiving an injection of midazolam, Lockett groaned and writhed on the gurney for about 40 minutes until his death, witnesses reported.
"I think the Supreme Court would prefer not to have to get involved in the details of executions, but felt compelled to because of what happened last year," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "Something went really wrong, and somebody's got to monitor this thing or states will keep repeating it."
The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case of a group of Oklahoma prisoners in April and make a final ruling by July. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, midazolam was used for at least 11 of 35 executions in 2014.
It's possible that midazolam would no longer be used. Other drugs might take its place or Oklahoma might decide to use a single-drug protocol in place of the current three-drug cocktail.
"I don't think that the death penalty is going anywhere," said Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.
Even if the court limits the use of lethal injection and states continue to face difficulty getting approved drugs, there are other methods that prisons could employ. Virginia lawmakers have already discussed bringing back the electric chair when the approved drugs are not readily available. Wyoming lawmakers have proposed allowing firing squads.
Death penalty experts doubt that such methods would become the primary protocol for execution. "States changed from hanging to electric chair because it was a modern, supposedly painless method of execution," said Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center. "There has been a continuous attempt to make executions appear more palatable, humane, and modern."
The rate of executions across the United States has decreased markedly over the past decade. Ten years ago 60 inmates were executed. In 2014, there were 35. Among the 32 states that allow the death penalty, only seven had executions in the past year.
To read more CLICK HERE

President Obama’s 2016 budget proposal totals $28.7 billion for the Department of Justice to support federal law enforcement priorities and the criminal justice priorities of our state, local and tribal law enforcement partners, according to a Department of Justice press release.

The Department of Justice’s areas of investment include:

+$65 million for the department’s law enforcement components, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, U.S. Marshals Service, and the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force program.

+$125 million for our litigating components, including the U.S. Attorneys, National Security Division, Criminal Division, Civil Rights Division, Civil Division, and the Environment and Natural Resources Division.

+$217 million for the prisons and detention functions of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

+$146 million for immigration and administration, technology, and other support functions, including the Executive Office for Immigration Review, Office of the Pardon Attorney, Office of the Inspector General, Community Relations Service, General Administration, and Justice Information Sharing Technology.

+$154 million for DOJ grant programs overall (Office of Justice Programs, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, and Office on Violence Against Women), for a total grant program request of $2.4 billion.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Ohio Gov. John Kasich has postponed all seven scheduled 2015 executions in the state as part of growing evidence suggesting that courts – and American society – are coming to a fresh showdown over the humanity of how states administer lethal injection, reported the Christian Science Monitor.
Governor Kasich’s decision comes as Ohio and other death penalty states struggle to finesse a lethal drug cocktail that would consistently end an inmate’s life humanely. The postponement was announced three weeks after the state said it would no longer use a controversial drug, midazolam, which was employed in a series of executions that went awry last year.
What’s more, the decision to delay comes one week after the US Supreme Court agreed to weigh whether a lethal injection cocktail using midazolam violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. And it comes almost exactly a year after Ohio executed Dennis McGuire, who appeared to struggle during a 26-minute execution that was expected to take no more than 10 minutes.

Similar problems with executions in other states – including the April execution of Oklahoma’s Clayton Lockett, who regained consciousness during the procedure and appeared to writhe in pain before expiring after 43 minutes – have played a role in raising concerns. So have high-profile exonerations, including a record six death row inmates around the country who had their sentences reversed last year.

The dynamics changed further last Friday, when the US Supreme Court agreed to again take up the issue at the behest of three Oklahoma death row inmates, who claim the drug cocktail now being used in the state isn’t powerful enough to induce deep sleep, making the process, in their opinion, inhumane. The court will hear the case in April and likely issue a ruling by June.
The decision will come at a time when society's support for the ultimate sanction appears to be ebbing. A majority of Americans still support the death penalty overall, but support has slipped from 78 percent in 1993 to 55 percent in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center. That level of support has remained unchanged the past five years, and does not seem to have been affected by a series of botched executions last year.
US juries, even in death penalty states like Texas, continue to condemn fewer and fewer people to death, according to a Dec. 19 Bureau of Justice Statistics report. The study found that 2013 marked the 13th straight year with a decrease in the US death row population. Sixty percent of the nation's death row inmates are housed in five states: California, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Alabama. Today, fewer than 3,000 people sit on death row in the US.
To read more CLICK HERE

Monday, February 2, 2015

President Barack Obama's task force on policing conducted a panel discussion at the University of Cincinnati. The panel included a police chief, an officer, a researcher and a civil rights activist – and their perspectives were as wildly different as their job descriptions, reported the Cincinnati Enquirer.
When asked about the use of force by police, Sgt. Michael McHale, of Sarasota, Florida, said police officers use force only when necessary and blamed "inflammatory rhetoric" in the media for fueling anti-police sentiment.
Rashad Robinson, executive director of the civil rights group ColorOfChange, described police misconduct as a national crisis and "one of America's great wrongs."
The men, who sat just two seats apart, represent opposing sides of the national debate that prompted Obama to form the task force in the first place. The president asked the task force to study how to strengthen trust between police and the public in the wake of several high-profile incidents last year, including a fatal shooting of an African-American man by police in Ferguson, Missouri.
The conversation hinted at how difficult it will be to come to a consensus on meaningful proposals. McHale, for example, emphasized the threat to police and said citizens needed to learn more about the risks officers face every day, possibly by attending police training sessions or going along with officers on patrol.
To read more CLICK HERE

Sunday, February 1, 2015

Texas death row inmate Robert Ladd man was executed on January 29, 2015 for the killing a 38-year-old woman nearly two decades ago while he was on parole for a triple slaying years earlier.

Ladd received a lethal injection after the US Supreme Court rejected arguments he was mentally impaired and ineligible for the death penalty, reported The Associated Press.

The court also rejected an appeal in which Ladd's attorney challenged whether the pentobarbital Texas uses in executions is potent enough to not cause unconstitutional pain and suffering.

Ladd was put to death for the 1996 slaying of Vicki Ann Garner, of Tyler, who was strangled and beaten with a hammer. Her arms and legs were bound, bedding was placed between her legs, and she was set on fire in her apartment.

In his final statement, Ladd addressed the sister of his victim by name, telling her he was 'really, really sorry.'

'I really, really hope and pray you don't have hatred in your heart,' he said, adding that he didn't think she could have closure but hoped she could find peace. 'A revenge death won't get you anything,' he said.

Then Ladd told the warden: 'Let's ride.'

As the drug took effect, he said: 'Stings my arm, man!' He began taking deep breaths, then started snoring. His snores became breaths, each one becoming less pronounced, before he stopped all movement.

When he was arrested for Garner's slaying, Ladd had been on parole for about four years after serving about a third of a 40-year prison term for the slayings of a Dallas woman and her two children. He pleaded guilty to those crimes.

About Matt

An analysis of crime and punishment from the perspective of a former prosecutor and current criminal justice practitioner.
The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or postions of any county, state or federal agency.